These cause its layers to come apart and the circuits to fail. Plus, atoms in organic materials are more chaotically organised than the inorganic materials used to make traditional electronics.

This means electrons move 1,000 times slower in organic materials, so devices made from them will operate much more slowly and wouldn’t deal as well with the heat the circuits generate.

Bio-compatibility

The other big issue is how to integrate e-skin with the human body so that it doesn’t cause medical problems and so that it can interface with the nervous system.

Organic materials are carbon-based (like our bodies) so in some senses are more likely to be biocompatible and not rejected by the body.

But carbon particles are good at passing through the cells that make up our body and this would likely to lead to inflammation, generating an immune response that could even, according to certain unverified theories, generate tumours.

However, scientists have already had some success linking electronic devices to the nervous system.

Researchers at the University of Osaka are leading pioneering research to develop a brain implant from a flexible matrix of organic thin-film transistors that could be activated just by thinking.

The difficulty is that such an invasive approach could lead to further problems, especially when we start testing the technology on humans.

In coming years we are are likely to see prototype e-skin devices gaining momentum in the form of wearable bodily sensors, and potentially as a way to harvest energy from the body’s movement.

What will take much longer are the more complicated circuits such as those found in smartphones.

And the other big question we’ve yet to answer is how many people will accept permanent or semi-permanent electronic implants. Would you be willing to effectively become a cyborg?